It is no coincidence that dogs are called man’s best friend: they are beneficial to the mental and physical health of their owners, and Some studies have shown If you are looking for a date and want to appear more attractive, it may be time to get a canine companion.
So what would it be like if dogs could live forever — and what if this secret could help their owners live longer, healthier lives, too?
A number of companies are now finding common ground between the two goals.
early next year, Loyal, an American biotechnology startupis confident it will bring LOY-002, a beef-flavored daily pill, to the market that can give dogs at least an extra year of healthy life.
The San Francisco-based company has raised $125m (£100m) in funding from companies that have refrained from investing in human longevity projects because of the decades these experiments would take.
But Celine Heliwa, founder and CEO of Loyal — part of Cellular Longevity, a biotech company researching the science of longevity — believes their work will benefit humans.
“Discovering how to prevent age-related decline in dogs is really strong evidence for doing the same in humans, because dogs develop similar age-related diseases, and share our environments and habits in ways that laboratory mice do not,” she said.
LOY-002 Pills are intended to mitigate and reverse the metabolic changes associated with aging: reducing frailty by reducing aging-related increases in insulin.
“We don’t make immortal dogs,” Halwa said. “The way medicine prolongs life, we hypothesize, is by extending health and thus reducing the rate of aging.”
The same target is being pursued in another laboratory located approximately 900 miles across America, where a team of academic researchers is feverishly testing the effect of rapamycin as part of the treatment. Canine Aging Project.
Rapamycin, a cheap, easy-to-produce drug commonly used as an immunosuppressant in humans after organ transplants, has been shown repeatedly to increase lifespan and delay—or even reverse—many age-related disorders in mice.
Although the drug has not been approved for use to extend life in humans, many gerontologists see it as our best hope for slowing the aging process pharmacologically.
The Canine Aging Project, the first large-scale, longitudinal study of large animals in a natural setting, suggests that low doses of rapamycin can increase the lifespan of dogs, improving heart and cognitive functions by regulating cell growth and metabolism.
“Our study is light years ahead of anything that has been done in humans or can be done in humans,” said Daniel Promislow, a biogerontologist at the University of Washington and co-director of the project. “What we are doing is the equivalent of a 40-year study in humans, testing the ability of a drug to increase healthy lifespan.”
Kate Creevey, co-founder and chief veterinary officer of the project, said they were in the unique position of being able to break down their findings not only by male and female dogs, but also before and after spaying, or surgical sterilization.
“This means that our research could have interesting translational implications for pre- and post-menopausal women,” Creevy said. “We also have data on the age of dogs that were spayed — which could account for variation in the age at which women go through menopause — and data on why they were spayed, which could extend to women who have had hysterectomies for medical reasons.”
When the project is finally reported in four to five years, Promislo hopes to be able to prove that rapamycin has the potential to give dogs an additional three years of healthy life.
Promislow insists that it is realistic to hope that his research will transfer to humans. “If we succeed in dogs, it could be a turning point in informing how we can give humans an additional healthy lifespan as well,” he said.
Research on canine longevity is warmly welcomed into the human longevity community.
Professor Tom Rando, director of the UCL Stem Cell Research Center and one of the most respected names in the gerontology community, said the research was “astonishing”.
“This work is another piece in the puzzle that we hope will eventually give us the full picture of human longevity,” he said.
“The more human animals we can test longevity drugs on, the more confident we will be that these drugs will work in humans as well,” he said. “Having evidence of efficacy and safety in dogs gives us more confidence to conduct human studies using these same drugs.”
But without consensus among scientists on human biomarkers of aging in the form of a simple blood test, scientists can’t test any drugs in humans, regardless, said Jamie Justice, an assistant professor of gerontology and geriatrics at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. How positive are the results elsewhere.
“Because we can’t do 40-year longevity tests in humans, we need a globally agreed-upon biomarker to show the effect of drugs on predictors of health problems that we agree are associated with aging,” she said.
“The goal of science now must be to agree on those parameters. Then the work can begin that will lead to the most exciting results of all – because they will be results that we can take to the market.”
